Vera Obrenović Delibašić
The story of Vera Obrenović Delibašić is a story of resilience, survival, and disappointment, not always in equal measure, and not necessarily in that order. One might also add forgetting, which is the result of marginalization during her life and neglect of memory after her death.
This Yugoslav writer, musician, translator, lecturer and archivist-in short, a cultural worker-left her mark on Sarajevo in several ways, and the city has given her little in return. In fact, her memory is largely obscured by the complex historical and social changes during and after her lifetime. One could say she has been doubly erased-once during her life, the second time after death. Her work and life today represent a gap in the literary and cultural history of a city, a gap that reflects political ruptures and cultural breakdowns that, undoubtedly, consume women’s lives first. Having said that, it must also be noted that biographies such as hers rarely fit contemporary Bosnian-Herzegovinian cultural narratives, often cut and tailored by the scissors of nationalism. Her example is not only an excellent illustration of what-and how-is lost in the nationalist cleansing of the literary canon, but also of how our literary and cultural history is impoverished by rejecting knowledge that does not align with the current ideological goals.
Because of all this, we should not begin with dates and facts, but with achievements. Who have we forgotten? The first female novelist of Bosnia and Herzegovina. Before Vera Obrenović Delibašić, no woman had published a novel. In communities that value their history, that fact alone would secure her place in the literary canon, even if her work were of only mediocre aesthetic merit. Which, it must be said, it is not.
In rare studies that do cover her books, Vera Obrenović Delibašić is often labeled ‘a writer of the Revolution’. And indeed, if anything defined her work, it was the Yugoslav people’s liberation struggle. Vera authored twelve thematically diverse books, spanning from poems and short stories to dramas, novels and biographies.
Vera Obrenović was born in 1906 in Livno into a family of teachers. A large family- seven sisters and one brother-and frequent relocations, typical of the teaching profession at the time. Livno in her earliest childhood, then Bosanski Šamac, Kostajnica, and finally Sarajevo, which marked her youth; these constant changes of residence seemed to foreshadow similar wanderings in her future life.
However, the life of the Obrenović family was not made difficult only by relocations and the fact that there were ‘many mouths to feed’. No, Vera Obrenović grew up and developed as a person in a particular historical period of upheavals and turbulences that shook the Balkans and Bosnia as much as the entire world. One must keep in mind that Vera was born a few years before the Annexation Crisis, and that during World War I, she was a little girl; great historical upheavals accompanied her life from beginning to end.
Upon arriving in Sarajevo, Vera completed Teacher’s College and an eight-year music school. In the absence of contemporary sources, with some stretch of imagination, we might imagine her as a teenager, a typical representative of the so-called progressive international Yugoslav communist youth. The ideas of Marxism and socialism, even early feminism, began to circulate among Yugoslav youth just as among young people in Europe.
Constant poverty made her, perhaps, more mature than her years, forcing her to take responsibility and start working and supporting her large family by giving school tutoring and private violin lessons. She was inspired by ideas of social justice and equality and discovered and nurtured a love for literature. A poetess, but not exactly a dreamer with her head in the clouds, but rather as a determined young woman moving decisively on her path, who saw art as her mission and inescapable destiny. Let’s picture her, for example, carrying her manuscripts to the post office to send them to eminent literary magazines after carefully rewriting and editing them night after night. Or practicing her violin in between tutoring sessions, tired, overworked, but determined to improve. Perhaps here she most resembles her early poems-dreamy, yet rooted in the pain and suffering of the people of this country, in their longing and fears. In 1927, Vera is twenty-one, her love for music and literature intertwined with a passion for a better life and a more just world. Soon, her first poetry collection, Restlessness of Youth, was published in 1927. That same year she secures her first employment with the Sarajevo Philharmonic as the first violinist and marries writer and professor of French literature Mihajlo Delibašić. Within a year, she already has a baby in her arms-a son named Predrag. A few years later, she graduates from music school and gets a job at the Higher Teacher’s School as a teacher of music culture and art. Life seems to be getting better. She is a young hope of Bosnian-Herzegovinian poetry; critic Borivoje Jevtić will describe her collection Restlessness of Youth as a book written by a “burning heart and trembling hand,” while the author will be called “the most original among poets writing in Bosnia at this moment,” one who is “not lacking in sincerity even when she strays” and who “knows how to find her own accent for her inner mood.” Another review, from one of the most respected writers of the time, Hamza Humo, writes how every one of her poems is “thirsty… for life and pained by its fleetingness,”; for Humo, the woman appears “closest and most natural when singing of love.” Upon arriving in Sarajevo, Vera completed Teacher’s College and an eight-year music school. In the absence of contemporary sources, with some stretch of imagination, we might imagine her as a teenager, a typical representative of the so-called progressive international Yugoslav communist youth. The ideas of Marxism and socialism, even early feminism, began to circulate among Yugoslav youth just as among young people in Europe. Vera Obrenović Delibašić: Doubly Erased Constant poverty made her, perhaps, more mature than her years, forcing her to take responsibility and start working and supporting her large family by giving school tutoring and private violin lessons. She was inspired by ideas of social justice and equality and discovered and nurtured a love for literature. A poetess, but not exactly a dreamer with her head in the clouds, but rather as a determined young woman moving decisively on her path, who saw art as her mission and inescapable destiny. Let’s picture her, for example, carrying her manuscripts to the post office to send them to eminent literary magazines after carefully rewriting and editing them night after night. Or practicing her violin in between tutoring sessions, tired, overworked, but determined to improve. Perhaps here she most resembles her early poems-dreamy, yet rooted in the pain and suffering of the people of this country, in their longing and fears. In 1927, Vera is twenty-one, her love for music and literature intertwined with a passion for a better life and a more just world. Soon, her first poetry collection, Restlessness of Youth, was published in 1927. That same year she secures her first employment with the Sarajevo Philharmonic as the first violinist and marries writer and professor of French literature Mihajlo Delibašić. Within a year, she already has a baby in her arms-a son named Predrag. A few years later, she graduates from music school and gets a job at the Higher Teacher’s School as a teacher of music culture and art. Life seems to be getting better. She is a young hope of Bosnian-Herzegovinian poetry; critic Borivoje Jevtić will describe her collection Restlessness of Youth as a book written by a “burning heart and trembling hand,” while the author will be called “the most original among poets writing in Bosnia at this moment,” one who is “not lacking in sincerity even when she strays” and who “knows how to find her own accent for her inner mood.” Another review, from one of the most respected writers of the time, Hamza Humo, writes how every one of her poems is “thirsty… for life and pained by its fleetingness,”; for Humo, the woman appears “closest and most natural when singing of love.” “In her, we love the gentle and tender sensitivity, which we men would crudely trample and thus feel prouder and stronger.” It is quite clear that the critics of that time read her through a gendered lens, that they read her, and some even dismissed her, as “feminine,” which in those days was not exactly a compliment.
We do not have many testimonies about what Vera was like as a child. The author of these lines does not know whether she was a pampered and protected youngest child, or an older one, who in those days almost always took on adult responsibilities, or perhaps the “middle” child, left to her own resourcefulness and adaptability. It is also questionable how much our modern understanding of family actually shapes our perceptions, as historically interesting times rarely produce typical family structures.
What is certain, however, is that the times were difficult and that teacher families mostly lived in poverty. From her earliest days, she grew up in a family of progressive views, which-despite poverty and lack of roots-fostered in their children a love for learning, education, and the arts. Her father Pavle Obrenović held anti-fascist and Yugoslav views. The fact that he was a teacher of Gavrilo Princip, the young man whose assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria was the spark for the beginning of World War I, brought even more hardships to the family. In the context of the Austro-Hungarian persecution of the Serbian population, Pavle and his wife, Vera’s mother, were often interrogated and subjected to police questioning. Pavle died while Vera was still young and left a large family in serious financial trouble. The family lost a legal case over the father’s share of the inheritance, which forced Vera’s mother, also a teacher, to accept house and office cleaning jobs in addition to her already poorly paid teaching job. We don’t know much, but we certainly know that it was not a carefree childhood. Those familiar with the circumstances say that Vera’s family could not afford more than two meals a day.
“In her, we love the gentle and tender sensitivity, which we men would crudely trample and thus feel prouder and stronger.” It is quite clear that the critics of that time read her through a gendered lens, that they read her, and some even dismissed her, as “feminine,” which in those days was not exactly a compliment.
Constant poverty made her, perhaps, more mature than her years, forcing her to take responsibility and start working and supporting her large family by giving school tutoring and private violin lessons. She was inspired by ideas of social justice and equality and discovered and nurtured a love for literature. A poetess, but not exactly a dreamer with her head in the clouds, but rather as a determined young woman moving decisively on her path, who saw art as her mission and inescapable destiny. Let’s picture her, for example, carrying her manuscripts to the post office to send them to eminent literary magazines after carefully rewriting and editing them night after night. Or practicing her violin in between tutoring sessions, tired, overworked, but determined to improve. Perhaps here she most resembles her early poems-dreamy, yet rooted in the pain and suffering of the people of this country, in their longing and fears.
In 1927, Vera is twenty-one, her love for music and literature intertwined with a passion for a better life and a more just world. Soon, her first poetry collection, Restlessness of Youth, was published in 1927. That same year she secures her first employment with the Sarajevo Philharmonic as the first violinist and marries writer and professor of French literature Mihajlo Delibašić. Within a year, she already has a baby in her arms-a son named Predrag. A few years later, she graduates from music school and gets a job at the Higher Teacher’s School as a teacher of music culture and art. Life seems to be getting better. She is a young hope of Bosnian-Herzegovinian poetry; critic Borivoje Jevtić will describe her collection Restlessness of Youth as a book written by a “burning heart and trembling hand,” while the author will be called “the most original among poets writing in Bosnia at this moment,” one who is “not lacking in sincerity even when she strays” and who “knows how to find her own accent for her inner mood.” Another review, from one of the most respected writers of the time, Hamza Humo, writes how every one of her poems is “thirsty… for life and pained by its fleetingness,”; for Humo, the woman appears “closest and most natural when singing of love.”
Apart from her, there would be only one other woman-Milica Miron. She soon after published her second poetry collection, simply titled Poems (1930). She writes in the ekavian dialect, in the manner of progressive writers of the time who voluntarily switched from their native ijekavian to ekavian, or from Cyrillic to Latin script, in the effort to create a unified Yugoslav cultural space, and continues advancing her craft in a constant dialogue with her contemporaries.
Her dedication to emancipation, especially the emancipation of the female subject through revolution, is connected to her personal experience, but in a somewhat unexpected way. Vera Obrenović-Delibašić was not born in a village and did not face the traditional constraints of women’s lives as a peasant woman might. Her background was not “working class” or “proletarian” in the classical sense-coming from a teaching position, it carried a certain status. What was not acknowledged was the fact that a teacher’s life was modest-perhaps not completely destitute like the proletariat, but certainly lacking many “bourgeois” traits. “Precisely because she did not come from utter poverty, because she wasn’t a ‘classic revolutionary profile,’ she was often mocked and marginalized, even within the partisan and communist circles.” Her days within the Sarajevo Group of Writers and other cultural circles of the time were surely marked by personal struggles and tensions. Becoming aware of her own privilege in a context where the majority of the population was uneducated-and thus, as well as for other deep reasons, disadvantaged-along with the constant, painful search for her own authorial voice, must have been a difficult process. From this period dates an interesting literary critique of Vera’s poetry, noted by Mevlida Đuvić. This review by Hasan Kikić, a leftist writer and engaged intellectual, notes that her poetry was “feminine, non-social, without higher pretensions or qualities,” which, according to Đuvić, confirms that a female poetic sensibility could not resonate loudly in the context of the interwar culture preoccupied with questions of Nation and Gender. But history once again intervened in the life of Vera Obrenović Delibašić. The monarchist authorities of the Kingdom of SHS did not tolerate communist views, and Obrenović was dismissed in 1932, after only one year of work, from the Higher Teacher’s School. Since 1930, she had belonged, as she herself wrote in a biographical note, to the “people’s workers’ movement, and since 1932 worked illegally under the leadership of the Communist Party of Yugoslavia.”.
Considering the clashes with the authorities faced by both her father and her husband-who before their marriage had been arrested in 1921, after the Communist Party of Yugoslavia was banned in 1920, and imprisoned in Glavnjača and Stara Tvrđava prisons with several other communists-it is clear that Vera’s fate cannot be thought of outside of political subversiveness.
Her views are, however, not yet evident in her poems, still very much concerned by the fleeting moods and innermost emotions, thematically mostly focused on love and longing. A lovely example is a poem The Wicked Moonlight: Don’t wait for me, mother- / My sheep have scattered, and the lambs are lost… / Moonlight fell upon the blooming meadow / And tangled in the bush my flowing hair; – /That’s why I didn’t come all night, mother! – / The cruel moonlight / Entwined my hair / And scattered the flock!
Among the partisans
Vera continued to write and publish, mostly poetry and occasionally essays, in nearly all major literary publications between the two world wars, while simultaneously working at the private Railway Boarding School in Ilidža. Her third poetry collection was published in 1940 by the Sarajevo chapter of SPKD Prosvjeta. But the normal course of life was (again!) interrupted by Yugoslavia’s capitulation to the Axis powers. Mihajlo fled to Bijeljina, where he was offered a teaching post at a high school, while Vera took her twelve-year-old son Predrag and sought refuge in the village of Batkovica near Višegrad, where they stayed “with progressive peasants.” They had to report daily to the Ustaša gendarmerie. Yet Vera did not waste time. She sensed the growing people’s revolt; what books, theory, literature, and passionate leftist discussions with colleagues had once foreshadowed was now coming true. She actively joined the preparation for the people’s uprising against the occupiers, gathering weapons, preparing for battle, organizing local youth, spreading ideas-which was not easy in a region that leaned more toward Chetnik and nationalist ideas than to communist ones. It was necessary to explain why it was important to join the partisans and to imagine what comes after victory-what kind of state do we want to build? Perhaps it can be said that only here does Vera truly mature into an engaged intellectual, on the ground, not among books and benches, but in direct contact with the people.
I imagine Vera fleeing during deportation to a concentration camp and crossing the Drina on her own after entrusting her son to a railway worker, reaching the territory controlled by the partisans. How much suffering and renunciation, and how much determination and
belief in victory were needed to survive that hopeless wartime period? On liberated territory, her son and husband would join her, and in Užice she became a member of the Partisan Art Unit “Dimitrije Tucović.” During the war, she actively participated in the cultural front, editing the newspaper of the Montenegrin Antifascist Front of Women (AFŽ) Naša žena (“Our Woman”). Little testimonies remained of her during wartime, however, on the margins of the publications that record the triumphs and losses of partisans, we find her reading her poetry to the peasants. Partisan memoirs note that famous partisan fighter, Mitra Mitrović, invited Vera to liberated Požega, where she had a public reading. “Because of her human kindness and warmth, she was well received everywhere, which is why activists often took her to assemblies to read her poems.” In addition to poetry, the testimony to her revolutionary optimism is the novel that she wrote during this period, which would remain her lasting and most important mark in the history of Bosnian-Herzegovinian literature. That is the novel Through No Man’s Land, published after the liberation in two parts (1948 and 1950), thematically dedicated precisely to no man’s land, the tri-border region of Bosnia and Herzegovina, Serbia, and Montenegro where she spent much of the war. We likely won’t be wrong in saying this was the novel of her life-not so much in an autobiographical sense, though those elements are probably present and strong -but in the sense that through this literary obsession, she fully committed her creative life to Yugoslav and anti-fascist ideals. That she saw this book as her most important work is likely confirmed by the fact that she returned to it and published a shortened version in 1971 under the title Višnja from No Man’s Land, this time focusing on the second important heroine of the story. Today, the novel Through No Man’s Land does not work to the tastes of a contemporary readership. Written in a chronicle manner, with an epic scope, today it might appear overly detailed and drawn out in its effort to offer a faithful depiction of social events and (partly) of the psychological struggles of its characters. In fact, it counts among the most extensive works within the topic of the national liberation war of Yugoslavia. However, “lyrical landscape often occurs as an interlude in her epic narration” ; documentarist and realist sequences, as well as ideological polemic, are regularly interrupted with picturesque descriptions of nature and brief sketches of psychological states of the main character. Stylistically, this novel can most precisely be classified as socialist realism, a rather rigid and genre-strict literary movement that considered aesthetics inferior to political and social realities, and emphasized the social-pedagogical function of literature through which socialist ideals should be imprinted on the readership. In its most rigid interpretations, social realism required that literature must never divulge the ruling ideology, which rather soon created a long-lasting and complex polemic in Yugoslavia on what is the ultimate role of literature in a society. But for a time, it was a prestige literary movement, spawning a series of (usually) novels that focused on the character of a self-sacrificing, idealized revolutionary, whose all efforts are fixated on the utopian communist ideal. What makes Vera’s novel, indeed a first novel published by a woman from Bosnia and Herzegovina, special is that she wrote the entire narrative from a female perspective, a rarity in the entire Yugoslav literary production at the time. The fact alone that we can witness woman’s view of the people’s liberation struggle, emancipation, and revolutionary transformation of Yugoslavia gives this text, however imperfect, an astute value in literary history of the region. By focusing on the coy “bourgeois” Olga, a pianist who marries an older man and tries to fulfill societal expectations in everything she does, Vera writes her a story of a budding communist whose attitudes shift as her life takes an unprecedented path – from refuge to the fight, and from fight to the forefront of the new society. “Through No Man’s Land” is, first and foremost, a coming-of-age tale of maturation into a new woman. Historical records testify that the novel was widely borrowed from the libraries, and there are indications that the print run was sold out. It was truly a cultural event of the time. Like her heroine, Vera returned to Sarajevo after the liberation of Yugoslavia and began a new life with her family in an apartment at Obala Kulina bana 9, in the center of Sarajevo.
Her wartime merits made her an influential social and cultural worker in the new state. This new role meant Vera was to take active participation in the building of institutional capacities in the cultural sphere and women’s rights: she became a member of the Secretariat of the Main Board of the AFŽ for Bosnia and Herzegovina, of the AFŽ Central Committee Plenum for Yugoslavia, the Press Bureau of Bosnia and Herzegovina, and co-founder of the Association of Writers of Bosnia and Herzegovina in 1945.
She was involved in adult education, later received a long-term editorial job-as editor-in-chief of the AFŽ magazine New Woman, then editor-in-chief of the illustrated magazine Vidik published by the Executive Front of Bosnia and Herzegovina.
Beyond the victory narrative
As a writer, Vera was extremely productive during the reconstruction and rebuilding of the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia. The books she published during this phase of her life were diverse. Poems came out in 1946, children’s poetry collections We Glean Across the Fields and From the Homeland Soil in 1952, and she even ventured into drama and screenwriting, albeit with less success . However, the short story collection Dawns Over the Mahalas (1955) would define this period of her life. These stories are about women, from a woman’s perspective, and approach the recently ended war in a somewhat different way. Her focus moves away from the triumphant revolutionary and explores a panorama of women’s characters and destinies transformed by the revolution, showcasing different phases of emancipation, not shying away from the depiction of conservative women, fascist collaborators, disappointed partisans, mothers scraping to feed and clothe their families in the post-war scarcity… Vera is now interested in the lives of women that don’t reflect “the monumental plan of historical victory, revolutionary enthusiasm and prosperity”, women who “bear the experience of misfortune, disorientation, and loss”. Đuvić notes how this “makes this prose distinctive within the contexts of collectivist socialist-realist literature, in the sense of revealing un-symbolized positions of individuality.”
But to understand why this book defines her forties, let’s return to the historically turbulent period for Yugoslavia, which dramatically reflected on Vera’s life as well.
The postwar reconstruction period was especially difficult for Vera due to health problems she faced-actually, consequences of wartime hardships and poor living conditions, which led first to abdominal typhus, then a viral recurrence of inflammation of the brain membranes and visual fields in both eyes, leaving her nearly blind for several years. Still, she continued working until she was granted a disability pension in 1950 in Sarajevo, and her vision gradually returned only after several years and a series of complex surgical procedures.
Alongside poor health that prevented her from fully engaging in her vocation and actively participating in building the society she had so long dreamed of, a special shock for Vera was the arrest of her son Predrag. Predrag was imprisoned first in Glavnjača prison in Belgrade (in an ironic twist of fate, the same prison where his father had been years earlier), and then transferred to the infamous Goli Otok camp, where political prisoners were sent as punishment. According to his own testimony in the book Almost Forgotten History: Memories of the Early Days of Yugoslav Film, Predrag ended up on Goli Otok due to a trivial personal conflict with his professor at the Film School in Belgrade. Predrag’s denouncer was Professor Vjekoslav Afrić, director of the first postwar Yugoslav film Slavica. In his book, Delibašić writes that Afrić complained about several students, accusing them of “undermining his leadership authority […] mentioning student names in a negative context […] accusing them and claiming their ‘guilt’ had political overtones.” That was enough for Predrag to receive a very harsh punishment, reserved for the most dangerous, politically subversive elements. Predrag was, in a way, like members of his family in previous decades, a victim of dramatic historical shifts that sometimes led to disproportionate authoritarian practices by the authorities. Such was the infamous Informbiro Resolution. At that time, Yugoslavia was undergoing profound political changes, and Tito’s famous “no” to Stalin, which earned the country political autonomy and laid the foundation for independent foreign policy and later economic development, also meant that many Yugoslavs-even those who had wholeheartedly fought for the state-would come under regime scrutiny, and their loyalty would be tested by the strictest standards. This meant that no one was considered entirely innocent, and the son of the literary couple Obrenović-Delibašić was also judged as such by the police apparatus. His Goli Otok episode lasted 18 months, during which his parents appealed to all their contacts, and it is likely that Vera’s acquaintance with Milovan Đilas was key.
After Predrag’s release from prison “through intervention from ‘the highest place'”, the family promptly moved to Belgrade. Predrag enrolled in directing studies at the Academy of Theater Arts (today the Faculty of Dramatic Arts in Belgrade), and the family lived in Francuska Street in Belgrade, once again in the city center, while their Sarajevo apartment was taken by the director of the Jugopetrol factory.
In his book, Predrag Delibašić writes that he was “seen off” to freedom by Vojo Biljanović, assistant to the head of state security under Aleksandar Ranković, with the words: “But know that it’s not over. For you or your mother.”
Vera’s life thus “unfolded” over several months-retirement, surgeries, the arrest and then release of Predrag, and then a swift move to Belgrade. We do not know how she coped with the arrest and the long wait, the months filled with fighting for her son’s freedom. We do not know how she “swallowed” the disappointment in the state she had fought for, nor what effect such stress had on Predrag’s father. We also don’t know if she loved Belgrade and her new surroundings, Francuska Street, and walks to the Hotel Moskva. But we do know, at least according to Predrag’s testimony, that she never returned to Sarajevo, although in 1955 her short story collection Dawns Over the Mahalas was published there, in which we can read her new thematic obsessions-above all, motherhood.
A brilliant example that we can now, in hindsight, read as a literary transposition of personal maternal anxiety is certainly the story Night over Mahala, in which we follow Sarajevo Jewess Dona Albahari, whose characterization is entirely woven from maternal trembling for her “strayed” children. The children, Sidik and Đusta, are, of course, partisan underground fighters, while it is implied that her husband, Šabotaj, was killed in Ustaša persecutions. Dona hides in the home of neighbor Beglerbegovićka, whose son Tufik is also an underground fighter, in a barn full of unseasoned hay, and she perishes in a horrific, almost phantasmagoric scene during Ustaša raid, with the name of her youngest son Haim on her lips. This harrowing testimony of a time when “a human head became cheaper than a chicken’s” brings no happy ending for a heroine, which is a significant departure from the genre framework in which revolutionary literature must celebrate exclusively the narrative of victory. It’s hard not to read here the echo of Vera’s most intimate thoughts after the collapse of her own family harmony, which rested on (socialist) ideals of diligent work and sacrifice, and was brutally broken by political violence.
After Predrag’s Goli otok episode, Vera slowly withdraws from public life. However, she remained an active participant in social and cultural reconstruction in the decades that followed.
She recovered from illness, continued to write and publish, tried new forms like drama and screenwriting, deepened her interest in children’s literature, and found employment in Montenegro, at the Historical Institute in Cetinje, where she worked as an archivist and researcher-collector of historiographical material. This position brought a certain degree of social prestige (literary historians record that she was assigned a driver and a personal assistant), while also allowing her to continue writing, as evidenced by the books From the Cradle to Sutjeska (1961) and Višnja from No Man’s Land (1971). The novel Through No Man’s Land was reprinted by Sarajevo’s Oslobođenje in 1987, cementing her importance in the literature of the National Liberation War (NOB). However, it is clear that her literature and activism gradually became less valued over the years-Yugoslav literature underwent a profound transformation, and the old poetic frameworks, such as socialist realism, were no longer relevant. Thus, very little of her writing was published, and what she managed to put out, was based on existing material and documentary works that remained within the bounds of regime-approved content. Therefore, what perhaps best symbolizes this new chapter of her life’s story, is the novelized biography of Sava Kovačević Mizara, the famous partisan commander, which was published in Podgorica. Instead of engaging with contemporary political and social realities-about which she surely had much to say-Vera chose to sail into the glorious past, recording what she considered important for the future generations.
Today we speak of her erasure from the canon of literary history, but perhaps the words marginalization and forgetting are more appropriate. In the book Women Documented, we find an entry about her stating that her “legacy and engagement were literally erased from all official overviews of Yugoslav and Bosnia-Herzegovinian literature after the end of the war conflict, with the intention to present that revolutionary and engaged literature was men’s job.”
In the same book, we find a moving account by Yugoslav writer Svetlana Slapšak about her: “However, while many former representatives of socialist realism successfully survived, some of them by immediately offering services with success, some after long years of silence and suffering, often faced with new difficulties, Vera Obrenović Delibašić was never given a second chance.”
Not everyone will agree with this statement; for example, Zlatan Tunjić points out that Vera was already marginalized as a writer during her lifetime, which he attributes to a combination of life circumstances, while the forgetting of her name after 1992 he considers systemic. The fact that she withdrew from public engagement after her son’s arrest, Tunjić explains as her inability to navigate the turbulent political moment, her unwillingness to compromise and seek consensus: “No matter how turbulent it was, it was a key moment in our history,” he concludes, referring to the Informbiro Resolution. “To be a revolutionary means to offer support even in not-so-good moments. Moments as these may or may not lead to positive outcomes. But from this perspective, you cannot know what those positive outcomes would be. You have to be able to act in the moment, to know what you’re doing, and that’s not for everyone,” Tunjić states.
But today it hardly matters whether Vera and Mihajlo, as devoted and later disappointed revolutionaries, were lost in the new times or not. Today, it is painfully clear why the memory of Vera Obrenović-Delibašić is absent from literary-historical, ethnically pure textbooks after the wars of the 1990s, when the shared cultural space was partitioned and officially dismantled. As an antifascist, a writer of the revolution who wholeheartedly believed in the supremacy of socialism and the Yugoslav idea, she undoubtedly became “undesirable,” which had less to do with her gender and more with her ideological beliefs. If we look at the other end of the political spectrum-the left, the feminist side-it too sought its role models elsewhere, certainly not in socialist realism, particularly in its earliest phase, which by the next decade was already deemed an outdated literary style. With this in mind, it’s possible to claim that Vera Obrenović-Delibašić was doubly erased, during her life and after her death. Vera Obrenović-Delibašić died in Belgrade in 1992. We will never know how she felt as she witnessed the slow disintegration of all the ideals in which she believed.
But what we are certainly witnessing today is a renewal of activist,but also academic interest in the period in which she lived and worked, as well as in the forms of shared life and practice in which she believed. After decades-long silence, an exhibition in 2015 in the Museum of Literature and Drama in Sarajevo, an institution that guards her legacy, revived her memory.
Fortunately, contemporary historians and researchers have a fine sense for different perspectives, and the female perspective is certainly something they always keep in mind; new studies by literary historians, concerning Vera, among other writers of her time, are almost ready to be published. Recently, popular feminist publications, such as illustrated book Women of Bosnia and Herzegovina and 100 Women – 100 Streets Named After Women , include her as a person whose life and work are unjustly forgotten, and feminist literary critics, acutely aware of the marginalization of woman writers, are starting to explore the predecessors, women who paved the way. The husk of silence surrounding the memory of Vera Obrenović Delibašić has been broken, and with it, one hopes, the long-overdue recognition of her accomplishments has begun.